


as the plant that never blooms

by virdant



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Flowers, Food, Language of Flowers, M/M, Magical Realism, Season/Series 01, hanahaki disease au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 03:22:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13941525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virdant/pseuds/virdant
Summary: When you love another, and they do not love you back, then a flower grows in your chest. It blossoms in your lungs so you cough up petals at the thought of them. Its leaves unfurl in your throat so you choke daily. Its roots burrow into your heart and remain until you perish.Garrett Jacob Hobbs loved his daughter so much that he murdered eight girls. Hannibal cut out lungs heavy with rose blossoms and mounted the body on a stag. Will Graham put nine bullets in Hobbs' chest and a flower did not bloom.





	as the plant that never blooms

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII](http://snippetandink.com/ceremony-reading-sonnet-xvii-poem-pablo-neruda/).
> 
> Apparently I don't know how to write Hannibal fanfic without writing copiously about food.

The vines had cut through the lung tissue, plant-matter finally replacing the cartilaginous tissue of the bronchi. The girl’s breath had already been labored even before Hannibal had cut open the torso, broken apart the rib cage, and finally sliced out the lungs, heavy with flowers.

He left the heart, a thin web of fibrous roots just beginning their assault on the muscle, and took the lungs back to Baltimore. He steeped the lungs in white wine vinegar, sharp and clean; seared the meat on high heat before cooking down the roots that had wended their way through the bronchioles; plated them, one lung beside the other, still steaming, on plates as white as antler bone.

Hannibal inhaled deeply, and it was if he were walking in a field of roses.

_I think I can help good Will see his face._

The knife was sharp when he cut in, dozens of white rosebuds still intact in the alveoli, just beginning to bloom.

 

* * *

 

(“He has a daughter,” Will said. “Same hair color, same eye color, same height, same weight. She’s an only child. She’s leaving home. He can’t stand the thought of losing her.”)

When you love another, and they do not love you back, then a flower grows in your chest. It blossoms in your lungs so you cough up petals at the thought of them. Its leaves unfurl in your throat so you choke daily. Its roots burrow into your heart and remain until you perish. They call it Hanahaki, from the Japanese word flower and to throw up, and there are three ways for it end.

The first, to die, the flower strangling your heart and lungs.

The second, to excise the flower, and with it all of your love and affection.

The third—

If they love you back, then the flower fades. Its roots retract, the blossoms wither, it slips away in the dead of night because what need do you have for a flower when you have a love?

There is no treatment. There is only time, ticking steadily forward even as the flower roots itself deeper, and the hope that one day perhaps they will love you in return.

(And she doesn’t love him back.)

 

* * *

 

The lavender had rooted itself into the heart, even as it pumped harder and harder to deliver the diminishing oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. It was a tough muscle, tenderized by the roots and blossoms that had finally made its way into the atriums and ventricles of the heart.

Hannibal ground the heart, lavender and all, with sage from the herb garden in his dining room. It had come from a particularly rude teller, who had been carrying an unrequited love for at least a decade for the flower to have made its way to the heart. Her love—pure, devout, held close within each breath in silent grace for years and years—had not sweetened her disposition that blustery day in March, and Hannibal had taken her business card and tucked it into his rolodex with all the others, awaiting this moment.

He stuffed the sausage casings with the mixture and tied them off with twine, packing a neat coil in a cooler with fresh peppers and mushrooms and eggs.

“A little protein scramble to start the day,” he said, opening the container. Steam unfurled, carrying with it the aroma of fresh eggs, salt and sage, and beneath it all, fragrant lavender.

“Mm, it’s delicious,” Will Graham said, finally looking up, distrust beginning to melt away. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” he said, and it was a pleasure, to see Will eat. He ate, one forkful at a time: soft eggs, sweet peppers, a piece of diced onion, sharp, and—

Will speared a piece of sausage and ate it.

At that, Hannibal said, “You know, Will? I think Uncle Jack sees you as a fragile teacup. The finest china, used only for special guests.”

He laughed, at that. “How do you see me?” he asked.

Hannibal took a bite. The heart was sweet on the tip of his tongue. He said, serenely, “The mongoose I want under the house when the snakes slither by.”

 

* * *

 

His first shot caught Hobbs in the shoulder. The next eight the chest.

“See?” Hobbs whispered, a bouquet of torment and grief spilling out with his blood. An acacia blossom tumbled into the growing pool, golden petals already darkening in death. With his death, his love was finally exposed.

“See?”

 

* * *

 

There were electronic mixers that could whip the egg whites for the meringue, but Hannibal preferred to make his by hand. He whipped, steadily, until it had stiffened into stiff peaks, the proteins denatured through the mechanical force of the steady movements of his arm.

He pipped the meringue with a steady hand, set it in the oven to bake under low heat.

In his kitchen, already, were dozens of white roses and violets, harvested by his own hand, brushed with egg whites, dusted with superfine sugar. The day they had been left out to dry had not discolored the petals, secured as they were under a layer of crystal sugar. They would remain fresh, preserved, as if under a layer of museum glass.

He placed a rose petal between his teeth—yearning, regret, and hope—and crunched down.

When the meringue had finished baking, he slid it out, topped it with vanilla ice cream and sprinkled it with the crystallized white roses and violets. The meringue was sweet, the ice cream cold, and the flowers crisp.

 _Baisers de vierge_. Virgin kisses. A traditional Escoffier recipe from a century ago.

He closed his mouth around each bite, like a kiss.

He thought of blood, splattered across Will Graham’s face—his first kill, his first victim, his first.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal’s patients came to him with a medley of maladies. They came with trembling hands, held open in supplication, and he tended to his garden of ailments with the same care he tended the herbs flourishing in his dining room.

Will came to his office under duress, and it was under the same duress that led him to ascend the ladder and wander the loft, studying the books with absent-minded intensity. He wandered now, like a vine, sinking roots across the ground and wending his way up railings.

“What’s that?” he asked, chin jerking at the paper held between Hannibal’s hands.

“Your psychological evaluation.” Hannibal said. “You are totally functional, and more or less sane. Well done.”

Will Graham stared at him, like a flower to the sun. “Did you just rubber stamp me?” he asked.

“Yes. Jack Crawford may lay his weary head to rest knowing he didn’t break you, and our conversation can proceed uninterrupted by paperwork.”

“Jack thinks I need therapy.”

“What you need is a way out of dark places when Jack sends you there.”

Will Graham continued, each step measured, like the notes of a song, along the loft. “Last time he sent me into a dark place, I brought something back.”

Blood splatter on his glasses, a tremor in his hands, an acacia blossom stained red with Hobb’s love. In the end, he had died by Will Graham’s hand instead of the strangling roots of his own love. How long had he held the flower at bay? It must have taken root when Abigail Hobbs started planning to go to college, blossomed at her first college visit—

Withdrawn the first time he mounted a girl in his antler room.

“A surrogate daughter?” Hannibal asked.

There was no warning for when a flower would take root. The same day that one fell into a hopeless love, the flower would sprout, its roots would extend into the vagus nerve, and a flower began to bud.

Perhaps Garett Jacob Hobbs had been carrying a seed since Abigail Hobbs was born. Perhaps it didn’t sprout until she reached puberty. Perhaps it didn’t flower until he realized he was losing her forever.

Had it been held at bay every time Abigail Hobbs lured another girl to her father?

“Jack will ask her when she wakes up,” Hannibal said. “Or he’ll have one of us ask her.”

His voice was incredulous. “Is this therapy, or a support group?”

“It is whatever you need it to be,” Hannibal replied, letting his voice flow like water.

 

* * *

 

He served _salade de fleurs_ for the first course: pansy petals that he pulled by the handful from otherwise healthy lungs mixed in with fresh arugula, baby green romaine lettuce, dark red lettuce, slivers of white onion, dotted with cracked pepper. The pansy petals were mildly minty, a contrast to the bitter arugula and sharp pepper.

Loin was the second course, from the same pig. There was a symmetry in this—the flowers that would have strangled this rude teller adorning the salad, the meat along the back for the main. Hannibal was not Garrett Jacob Hobbs, consuming every part of a body to honor it. The riot of pansies were an unexpected boon when he sliced into the chest cavity, still intact, still perfect.

The rude often contained much unrequited love within them.

Jack Crawford did not know what he was eating. He exclaimed over the salad, he relished the loin, and he would savor the delicate fruit tarts, garnished with the same white roses that Cassie Boyle had contained.

“I want to understand why you’re so delicate with Will,” Hannibal said, the sweetness of the Cumberland sauce lingering on the tip of his tongue. The loin was tender, flavorful. It rested readily in his stomach with every bite.

Will Graham was not at his table, today. His singular mind was far away, contained in other territory. But one day—

A rose petal rested on his tongue, still white, still pristine under the layer of clear sugar.

One day.

 

* * *

 

After Abigail Hobbs woke up, Hannibal went with Will to visit her. He followed behind him, watching Will Graham meet the girl whose father he killed.

“I remember you,” Abigail said, to Will. “You killed my dad.”

Garrett Jacob Hobbs had loved his daughter so much that a flower had blossomed in his heart. There was no flower germinating in Will’s chest. His breathing was cut short with the rapid rush of nightmares, not vines strangling his lungs. His heart pounded from terror, not in a futile attempt to beat off the roots clinging deeper. The love the bloomed within him was not for Abigail Hobbs.

Garrett Jacob Hobbs was dead, but Will Graham could feel the echoes, still. A cut flower could still grow, and these roots had yet to wither, wrapped around his perforated heart.

In the midst of a garden flourishing as healthily as the acacia that had bloomed in Garrett Jacob Hobb’s chest, his daughter asked, “So killing somebody, even if you have to do it, it feels that bad?”

In the distance, a flower spread its petals to the sun, and Will Graham said, “It’s the ugliest thing in the world.”

 

* * *

 

He cut the tomatoes into roses, as red as the ones that had bloomed in the woman whose blood he had drained and butchered for tonight’s feast. She had yet to realize what she carried in her: roses as vibrant as blood, their petals still furled into tight buds, the vines just beginning to make their way through her bronchi.

“Centrifugate, separate the matter from the water, creates a transparent fluid.” Hannibal kept his movements steady as he poured, the liquid as clear as water. “Serve with tomatoes in suspension and everybody will love the sweet taste.” He looked up at Will. “Are you sure you can’t stay?”

He demurred, “I don’t think I would be good company.”

“I disagree.”

But Will would go, and Hannibal would let him, after:

“Why did you stop being a surgeon?”

The very last patient Hannibal had seen as a surgeon had been a girl with a garden blooming in her chest. Her heart had been frail and erratic, the unrequited love having rooted deep into her heart. It had budded, had flowered, and now the flower would die and take the girl along. It had flourished with every waking moment she spent thinking of her love, and the only recourse was to cut the flower out, taking with it her memories and sentiment.

She had refused. Lying in the operating room, she had chosen death over loss, but Hannibal had been handed loss.

She was not the first patient that Hannibal had lost; it happened in his line of work. But this time, it had felt like murder. Hannibal had watched her die, and the operating room filled with the aroma of a thousand violets, their roots twisted with the bronchioles so closely that they could no longer be separated.

He inhaled, deeply. His eyes closed, and he was in a garden long abandoned, a child’s laughter fluttering in the wind, and a deep gnawing hunger that stretched through his gullet—

He left surgery that day.

 

* * *

 

A plucked flower could thrive, with water, with care, with luck. Cut a bud from the vine, nurture it with love, and it could bloom. If it were important; if it mattered, then a flower could blossom in the darkness of a cavernous chest.

“Just because you killed my dad doesn’t mean you get to be him,” Abigail replied, dashing water across the doorstep as an acacia bud falls into a pool of blood.

Hannibal scooped the petals, pressed them into Will Graham’s hands to let the wind blow them away, and Abigail Hobbs dug into soft dirt—not to plant a seed, but to unearth Nicolas Boyle.

Days later, after Will Graham discovered that Abigail Hobbs had murdered Nicolas Boyle, he came to Hannibal’s office and entered without knocking, letting himself in with candid familiarity that Hannibal has nurtured. He had, with the same discerning insight that identified Garret Jacob Hobbs as a sufferer of an unrequited love for his daughter, finally seen Abigail for the killer that she is.

Hannibal let Will dig in the soft dirt of his grief. “I was hoping it wasn’t true,” Will whispered, silt under his nails, watered with grief.

“Well, now you know the truth,” Hannibal replied, a gardener planting his seeds in preparation for the spring. He had tilled the soil, churned it in preparation for the warmth of spring. Will shivered, still caught in winter.

“We are her fathers now,” Hannibal said, and Will said nothing. “If you go to Jack, then you murder Abigail’s future.”

There is no sound, underground. Just the flourishing of unknown things.

“We can tell no one,” Hannibal murmured, and in the darkness of the secret that they share, a flower does not bloom.

 

* * *

 

The table was spread: scones, their tops golden-brown, dotted with lilac petals; soft cucumber sandwiches with geranium blooms, pale lavender jelly, rosemary-crusted roasted heart sandwiches. The finishing touch was the pot of tea: rose-blended Assam, a wisp of steam curling from the spout.

Hannibal wondered if Will would see the presentation; the lilacs taken from a widow whose lungs had grown heavy after her husband had died, the pink geranium blossoms from the rude man in the grocery store who fixated on his secretary, the lavender from a serene girl with a tendency to fling car doors into other cars, the rosemary from a man who had never forgotten his childhood love, and the roses harvested from the lungs of a dozen rude pigs, the petals a potpourri of color.

Will said, “You’re serving me tea.”

“Rose-blended Assam tea,” Hannibal began, lifting the pot to pour Will a cup. “Lilac scones.” He gestured to each in turn, and finished with, “Rosemary-crusted roasted heart, sliced thin, on a whole wheat olive oil bread.”

“It looks delicious,” he said, discomfited. “But—”

Hannibal set the teacup before Will.

It was made of fine white china, with silver embossing along the lip and handle. Will’s fingers—long and fine despite all the work he did—slid along the handle as if they belonged there, for all his clumsiness. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank, and Hannibal swallowed as if he could taste it with him: sweet roses in bouquet, cutting through the buttery overlay, the black tea rich and creamy. He inhaled, deeply, in concert with Will Graham as he set the cup down.

“It’s good,” Will said. He frowned down at the tea. “It’s got roses in it?”

Hannibal picked up his own cup and inhaled, and it was as if he was in a garden of roses, nobody there except for Will Graham, a perpetual presence in his mind. He plucked a white one from a bush, and Will Graham watched. He transversed the paths of his mind, sweeping to collect a pink rose from deep behind the leaves of the bush, the thorns pricking the pad of his thumb. He cut a yellow rose as it reached towards the sun, forever out of reach. He plucked a red rose as it hung from the vines—dark as blood.

He said, “I blended it myself.”

Will lifted the cup to his lips again. He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing. He looked over the spread, skeptically.

Hannibal picked up a sandwich of rosemary and roasted heart, setting it on bone china and placing it before Will. “Eat,” he encouraged, and watched, avaricely, as Will chewed crunched through the rosemary crust, chewed the tender heart beneath his teeth, swallowed the unrequited love that another man had never been able to move past.

Will buttered a scone and ate it, between deep swallows of tea. Hannibal refilled his cup, over and over, and Will ate and drank and ate and drank.

Rosemary for remembrance. Hannibal bit down through the crust, into the heart, the meat flavorful, salted strongly enough for it to cut through the warmth of the tea still lingering in the crevasses of his cheeks. He inhaled, deeply, and fixed Will Graham—seated at his table, bringing another sandwich to his lips, his face open and turned to the sun—in this room, in permanence, in his mind. 

**Author's Note:**

> Love and thanks to Mikachi, Pann, and Adzusai, for their patience and assistance throughout this entire story. Thanks to Adzusai for all of the medical assistance and for fixing my carpal tunnel. Thanks to Pann for the excellent alpha reading. Special special thanks to Mikachi, who planned out the menus and taught me everything I know about cooking and eating flowers. 
> 
> Floral dishes are as follows:
> 
>   * White roses in lungs, cooked in white wine vinegar. 
>   * Heart-and-lavender sausages seasoned with sage in a scramble with onions and bell-peppers.
>   * _Baisers de vierge_ aka Virgin kisses (via Escoffier): Merignue with vanilla ice cream topped with crystallized rose and violet petals
>   * _salade de fleurs_ aka salad with flowers: Pansy petals mixed with arugula and lettuce, topped with onions and black pepper
> 

> 
> Flowery Tea Time!
> 
>   * Rose-blended Assam tea
>   * Lilac scones
>   * Cucumber sandwiches with geranium blooms
>   * Rosemary-crusted roasted heart, sliced thin on rosemary olive oil bread
>   * Lavender Jelly
> 

> 
> Find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/virdant) and [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/virdant)! I am virdant on both.
> 
> Kudos and comments are always appreciated. [[Reblog on Tumblr here]](https://virdant.tumblr.com/post/171811590176/fic-hannibal-tv)


End file.
